What was Palladium?
Taxil purported to reveal the existence of “Palladium,” the most secret Masonic order, which practiced devil-worship. He recounted the story of its high priestess Diana Vaughan; and ended by publishing the “Memoires d’une ex-Palladiste” after her conversion to Catholicism. When doubts began to spread, Taxil realized the time had come to end the deceit. In a widely reported conference in Paris (April 19, 1897), he confessed that it had all been a hoax. After Taxil’s public confession, Abbe de la Rive expressed his disgust and recanted his writings on Diana Vaughan in the April 1897 issue of “Freemasonry Disclosed”, a magazine devoted to the destruction of the Craft. As much as he hated Freemasonry, de la Rive had the integrity to admit Taxil’s hoax in the following editorial: “With frightening cynicism the miserable person we shall not name here (Taxil) declared before an assembly especially convened for him that for twelve years he had prepared and carried out to the end the most extra
